---
title: Our 2023 year in review.
description:
  Let's review our year in 2023, analyze our metrics, and discuss our future
  plans.
author:
  name: Thibault Le Ouay Ducasse
  url: https://twitter.com/thibaultleouay
publishedAt: 2023-12-29
image: /assets/posts/2023-year-review/title.png
---

It has been a wild six months for us at OpenStatus. In late June, we began
writing the first line of code for OpenStatus.

We started with a simple idea: make an open-source a status page, but we quickly
realized that we could do more. We could build a platform that would allow you
to monitor your services and notify your users when something goes wrong.

In this article, I will share with you the challenges we encountered and how we
solved them. We will also be sharing our metrics and our plans for the future.

# A quick recap of our journey

## June 2023

**Middle of month**

I asked on Twitter if people would be interested in an open-source alternative
for a status page. Max replied to me, and we started to work on the project.

<Tweet id="1669684109294157826" />

**End of month**

We wrote the first line of code for OpenStatus.

## July 2023

**Middle of month**

My tweet got a lot of traction, and and it gave us the motivation to continue to
build OpenStatus.

<Tweet id="1679026811609464832" />

**End of month**

We launched the initial version of OpenStatus, which was more than just a basic
status page. We incorporated website monitoring features that would shape the
future of OpenStatus.

Max's Twitter thread went viral, gaining us a lot of attention on the platform.

<Tweet id="1685666982786404352" />

After that OpenStatus trended on GitHub for a few days.

## August 2023

**Middle of month**

We launched our first paid plan, which allowed us to cover our costs. Couple of
hours after the launch, we had our first paying customer. We were so happy! 🎉

## September 2023

It was a month of reflection for us. We were a bit confused about the direction
we wanted to pursue at that time. Having just a status page as a side business
is cool, but we also aspire to build something that could become a full-fledged
company in the future.

## October 2023

**Beginning of month**

We launched on Hacker News, and we got a lot of feedback from the community. We
were so happy to see that people were interested in our project.

<Image
  alt="New users per week"
  src="/assets/posts/2023-year-review/show-hn.png"
  width={650}
  height={575}
/>

We were not expecting such a good traction from the hacker news community

**Middle of month**

For some cost saving reasons, we decided to migrate our checker infrastucture
from Vercel to Fly.io.

**End of month**

We told our migration in a blog post, and it got a lot of traction, also on
Hacker News.

<Image
  alt="New users per week"
  src="/assets/posts/2023-year-review/blog-hn.png"
  width={650}
  height={575}
/>

## November 2023

We have rewritten our checker infrastructure in Golang to enhance stability,
resulting in cost savings on fly.io server.

## December 2023

We have launched our deploy your own status page

# Our metrics

## Our product metrics

<Image
  alt="New users per week"
  src="/assets/posts/2023-year-review/users-per-week.png"
  width={650}
  height={575}
/>

**Number of new users per week**

<Image
  alt="New monitors per week"
  src="/assets/posts/2023-year-review/monitors-per-week.png"
  width={650}
  height={575}
/>

**Number of monitors created per week**

<Image
  alt="New Pages per week"
  src="/assets/posts/2023-year-review/pages-per-week.png"
  width={650}
  height={575}
/>

**Number of page created per week**

## Other metrics

<Image
  alt="GitHub stars"
  src="/assets/posts/2023-year-review/github-stars.png"
  width={650}
  height={575}
/>
**Number of GitHub stars**

<Image
  alt="Visitors per month"
  src="/assets/posts/2023-year-review/visitors.png"
  width={650}
  height={575}
/>

**Number of visitors per month**

<Image
  alt="Search console"
  src="/assets/posts/2023-year-review/search-console.png"
  width={650}
  height={575}
/>

**Search console**

## Financials

<Image
  alt="MRR"
  src="/assets/posts/2023-year-review/mrr.png"
  width={650}
  height={575}
/>

**Monthly recuring revenue**

# Let's talked about our 2023 year

## What went well

We launched OpenStatus 🔥. We didn't waste too much time over-engineering it.

We had a good traction among the developer community. We were able to get a lot
of feedback from the community, which helped us to improve our product.

The number of GitHub stars, users are a good indicator of the traction we had.

We both reach more than 1000 followers on Twitter.

## What could have gone better

We can brag about our MRR on Twitter but we are still not profitable. We are
still not able to cover our costs despites a small MRR.

We could have listen more to our users. We could have done more to improve our
product. We should have done more users surveys.

## What went wrong

We got confused. We were not sure about the direction we wanted to pursue. We
also got defocused when VC started to reach out to us. They are paid to talk to
you but not us. We are not building anything when we are talking to them.

They also don't know more than us about what our customers want. They are not
the one we should listen to. We should listen to our users 😁

We still pay too much for Tinybird 😭.

# Our plans for 2024

First we want to reach profitability. 😁

We will allocate more time to the project 🚀

We will follow our intuition and not listen to VC. We will listen to our users
instead. 🤦
